Sick dinosaurs arched necks near death

The arched neck of this Archaeopteryx shows it would have been sick when it died, scientists say. The image was drawn from a specimen at the Humboldt Museum in Berlin (Image: University of California, Berkeley)(Source: University of California, Berkeley)

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The arched necks of dinosaur fossils may really be the signs of their death throes and not the result of drying dead tendons, as palaeontologists have long assumed.

A new examination of the possible causes for the strange death posture by a veterinarian and a palaeontologist not only throws out the drying tendons theory, it points to some very specific causes of death.

It even supports the idea that dinosaurs were warm-blooded.

For decades dinosaur hunters have assumed that the open-mouthed, backward-arched pose of many dinosaur skeletons was the result of the long tendons in the back of the neck drying after death and shrinking, pulling the head up and back.

"I don't think anyone had really thought about it," says palaeontologist Professor Kevin Padian of the University of California, Berkeley. "No one had really tested the idea."